On Hope

 

On Hope

December 3, 2023

Today is the first Sunday of Advent this year. It is hope Sunday. Each Sunday of Advent addresses one theme or another. Today’s is hope. At the church I attend, this morning the pastor began the service by asking everyone, briefly to discuss with another person the question, “Where do you find hope today?” or something much like that. I turned to the man I usually sit next in choir and said, “As we used to say when I was a lawyer, ‘Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence!’” I’m not sure my friend got what I meant, so I said, “What in heaven’s name makes you think that I have any hope?” I have always struggled with the concept of hope. Years ago I told my father that I had trouble preaching on hope. He said, “That’s because you don’t have any.” I fear he was right back then, and if I had no hope then, I sure as hell can’t have any today. I have two problems with the idea of hope. One is that I don’t know what the word is supposed to mean. The other is that the world today is such a God-awful mess that I can’t much of anything positive, including hope, anywhere.

So, what is hope? Online definitions include “a feeling of expectation and a desire for something to happen.” And “want something to happen or to be the case.” Almost everything I see about hope online has hope including an expectation that the thing hoped for will come to be. The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary defines hope in the Bible as “the expectation of a  favorable future under God’s direction.” So what does “expectation” mean? Online definitions include “a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.” So it seems that hope involves wanting something to happen but not only that. It includes an expectation that the thing hoped for will in fact happen. Perhaps in colloquial usage hope just means “want to happen,” but in more sophisticated usage it seems to include a belief that the thing you hope for will happen.

We people of faith are told all the time to have hope. I take that exhortation to mean that we are to trust that the future will be better than today is. We’re supposed to trust that God will make the future better than today is. Hope in this sense seems to me to be the opposite of despair. To be in despair is to be lost in the bleakness of a situation. To have hope is to believe or at least trust that the situation will improve. It may also include the idea the God is the one who will make the situation improve. In her sermon this morning my pastor said, basically, have hope; and you can have hope because you have God.

And this is where I hit a brick wall. I am, among other things, a professionally trained historian. When I look at history I see example after example of simply horrific, destructive, murderous things happening the world over. And, it seems, God does nothing to stop those things from happening. Just in recent history, God didn’t stop the killing of millions of people in World War I for no purpose anyone could understand. God didn’t stop Stalin’s terror. God didn’t stop the Holocaust. God didn’t stop the killing of over twenty million Soviet people in World War II or stop the horrific casualties other combatants on all sides suffered. God didn’t stop Mao from killing millions of people. God didn’t stop my country from carrying on a pointless and ultimately futile war in Vietnam. Today, God hasn’t stopped Putin’s Russia from conducting an unprovoked war of aggression against Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. God didn’t stop Hamas from murdering, raping, and abducting well over one thousand Israelis on October 7 this year. God hasn’t stopped the Israelis from killing thousands of innocent people—women, men, and children—in Gaza in its attempt to wipe out Hamas, something it probably can’t do by military means in any event. The list of horribles like these across history is essentially endless.

So hope? How? Sure. I can want things to get better, and I do. I may even be able to do a tiny bit of the work necessary to make things better, and I have done at least the tiniest little bit of that work. But I simply cannot expect that things will get better. Both the history of the world and the world today are far too stained with blood for that. We humans may be capable of great things. We are capable of great love. We are capable of wondrous scientific discoveries. We are capable of great art, literature, philosophy, theology, and music. We are even capable of great faith. That’s all true, but it does nothing to offset the horror we humans so often and so willingly inflict on ourselves.

It is appalling easy for the powers around the world to convince ordinary people in their country that killing ordinary people from some other country is not just justified, is not just necessary, but is actually noble. How do they do it? How did the Nazis get an untold number of ordinary Germans to conduct the Holocaust? To turn the valves that released the gas? To shoot people in the back of the head so their dead bodies fell into a pit they had forced the people they eventually killed to dig? They did it by convincing ordinary Germans that Jews and other targets of Nazi hatred like homosexuals, gypsies, and the disabled weren’t even human. We humans are so willing to dehumanize other humans. In World Wars I and II, to most Americans most Germans weren’t people, weren’t children of God, they were “krauts,” kraut being a word in German that means plant not human. During the Vietnam war Vietnamese people weren’t people to most Americans or at least to most American soldiers, they were “gooks.” During the Cold War, to most Americans Russians weren’t people, they were “pinkos” or at best “Russkies,” a corruption of the Russian word for Russian. Do you want some people to kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of other people? Convince them that the people they’re killing aren’t people. It’s is shockingly easy to do.

So hope? How can anyone have any hope at all in this world? How can anyone have hope without deceiving themselves into believing that they do? I wish I had an answer to that question. I have only sort of an answer. This morning I said to the man I was discussing hope with that the only possible basis for hope is God. God is the only hope we have. We sure as hell can’t really have any hope in people left to their own devices. And is God really a source of hope? Perhaps in the long run. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others have said that the arc of the universe bends slowly, but it bends toward justice.

I think there is some truth in that sentiment. The line of history that goes at all from injustice to justice is far from a straight one. We humans keep regressing into a barbarism we like to tell ourselves we’re incapable of. Nonetheless, much of the world (though certainly not all of it) is ordered in more just ways than was, say, the Roman Empire. Many people today live in countries that are at least nominally democratic. Many countries today do at least something to preserve the human and civil rights of their people. None of them does it perfectly, but at least many people today aren’t ruled by a brutal Roman governor like Pontius Pilate. When I think of this issue I always remind myself that the Romans used execution and fights to the death as public entertainment. We just watch football.

So maybe there is some ground for hope; but if there is, it is hope that becomes real only very slowly and irregularly over very long periods of time, long at least by human standards. Is God the ground of that hope? Perhaps. We people of faith want God to be a ground of hope. We cling to God as a ground of hope. Perhaps we even trust that God is a ground of hope. Like I said, God is, after all, the only possible ground of hope there is. I don’t know why God allows so much suffering in the world. I don’t think anyone really understands why God does that. All I can do is trust that somehow, in God’s ways not human ways and over God’s time not human time, God does make life better. God certainly calls us to make life better for other humans not to slaughter them or even just to ignore their suffering. We can turn to God for comfort and perhaps inspiration as we try to do that work. But I have to say, hope in God is a thin reed. It’s weak at best, but it’s all we’ve got. So I cling to it. I fight falling into despair. Sometimes I succeed in that fight a little bit, sometimes I fail in it completely. I am not a hopeful person. I never have been. I’m quite sure I never will be. But maybe I have just enough hope in God to get me through this life without completely falling apart over how brutal life so often is. At least, I hope I do.